A2B is just another balance issue. Online games always struggle with these developments. Players are crafty, you see, and they'll crunch all of the numbers until they find the absolute "best" spec and gear. Developers find this uber-meta that produces unexpected results and decide to nerf it down to make other specs more desirable.

Unless they change every duty officer that affects cooldowns or otherwise has a passive 100% chance to a proc like they sound like they want to do with A2B, all this will accomplish is forcing people to use cstore duty officer packs or pay 50+m on the exchange for purple conn officers or other stupidly rare doffs.

Which is exactly what Cryptic intends of course. The reason why A2B is bad isn't because it's a balance problem but because you can get it for free.

They've made several conscious, public efforts to minimize it, actually. Like the Nukara rep traits going off of aux, and Inspiring Leadership having an internal cooldown to prevent, roughly quoting, over-proccing due to abnormally frequent power activation due to A2B.

Well sometimes it seems more like the systems team are trying to limit it (with the things you mentioned) and the rest of the team is adding to it with more and more new ships that can easily fit it with no sacrifices.

They've left it so long the only two real choices are either completely and totally cripple it by changing the doffs to do something else entirely and/or removing the aux to battery ability or live with it and make other options more attractive (only way I could see that working is with a complete rework of the ability cooldowns system or increasing the sources of Zemok-like doffs)

To be fair, some of us are game designers for a living and might have better ideas than bort.

But Cryptic is also heavily constrained by the 'what do we do about it now?' problem,rather than a 'what should it have been in the first place'. A great design for a new game from scratch might not work with the existing playerbase, who presumably play the game because on average they like it enough to keep playing.

Wow. I wish more developers understood that. Your players already like your game, or they wouldn't be playing. So ... why are you doing a total revamp of all the classes (AoC, Rift, LOTRO, too many others to mention)?

The players do not know more than the devs. Please never say that ever again. Can we see server data? Pull actual serverside information? No. We can use Combat logs but that's only a portion of the data that the devs can access, they have the real numbers and coding to back their claims, so please, don't try to say that.

Do we need to go over the BFI shield healing issue, that the devs only looked into after someone posted 10GB of log files with charts to explain what was wrong? After a year.

Can we see server data?

No, but that doesn't mean anyone at cryptic bothers to look at it, or looks at it the right way, or has the skills to understand what they're looking at. Data science isn't trivial after all. They've only got a couple of hundred people on staff, the playerbase is probably 1000 times that.

That is after all how exploits and weird gimmicks happen. The day new stuff is released ya definitely the devs know more than we do. But a month from now and the right person stumbling upon (or just thinking the right way) about a problem and they can start exploiting it. Automated tools to catch cheating players are only so useful, particularly if they aren't actually exploiting but just making really clever use of game mechanics. I can't seriously imagine anyone at cryptic sat down when the designing the scimitar and said 'ok, so we're going to make a ship that will cap in these particular circumstances at 83k DPS' or whatever it is. Too many variables for even a well trained team of testers to asses, and least compared to a playerbase with months to hammer away at the problem.

We can use Combat logs but that's only a portion of the data that the devs can access, they have the real numbers and coding to back their claims, so please

And for some things the real data from the combat logs will disagree with what they think the coding says (e.g. all of the stuff that went on with Fire at Will). Testing is hard, expensive and difficult to do thoroughly.

But combat logs aren't the entirety of the game either, particularly interesting combinations of doffs are both a deliberate element of the system and a problem when you consider the sheer scale of possibilities.

I'm not trying to disparage cryptic here particularly, every software development team faces a similar problem, and of the couple of hundred people who work at cryptic most of them (artists, management, marketing, tools programming and others) aren't going to know anything about game balance or gameplay design particularly. I'm working on a book on the topic at the moment because I've been asked to do so. There aren't a lot of good resources for people to even start with, and a lot of stuff that can go wrong doesn't rise to the level of people with graduate degrees in maths trying to figure out what to do about it.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of players all playing for months is a lot more testing than a company the size of of cryptic can manage. Even if they have access to the data they need to know what to look for to try and understand what's broken.

Usually it's not even the case of bad coding, or even bad system design - It's just a case of developers only being able to think up so many scenarios per "system component" in the given QA time. Once you turn it loose on the public, all manner of shit is going to go down.

A good, non-computer-game example would be Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition. Wizards of the Coast used to have an official min/max forum, where players would post challenges to other board members. I still remember one of them:

"You get a level 16 character with the standard starting wealth for that level. You are allowed to use official WotC books only when designing it. For combat, you get 10 rounds of preparation and 10 rounds of actual combat. Assuming that damage bleeds over to the next target, how many adult white dragons can you kill in those 10 rounds of combat?"

The winner came up with a build (Cleric Archer) that could kill 221 adult white dragons in 10 rounds. Two hundred and twenty one. You can bet your ass that this was never intended by the developers, and the math/combinations used in that build was mind blowing. I loved going to those boards just to see what kind of crazy combinations people could come up with.

Point is, every game that has complex systems will be exploitable. There are only so many things a designer can account for in their given time frame. The playerbase has oceans of time available compared to the devs, and if there are exploits/combos to be found, they will find them. If A2B gets nerfed, something else will come along (and it already has, in the form of Zemok builds), and if that gets nerfed, a third option will be found, and a fourth, and so on.

I don't even get the A2B hate any more - As it stands, it's not the best option any longer - it's a solid choice for a lot of tac-lite ships, but it's by no means the best.

No offense, but you're simply wrong on this. I've seen it too many times now. Devs think something works a certain way, players try to show them it doesn't, devs eventually look into it and find out players were right all along.

The earliest example of this was in Asheron's Call back in 1999 when players reported issues with the monsters' threat mechanic (certain people would just walk into a room and, no matter how many players were in the room, all the monsters would run over to attack the guy who just walked in). Turbine kept denying that this could happen because their RNG worked fine in in-house testing. And then one day a dev put in a little extra time and found out the players had been right all along.

I've seen similar things in other games (EQ2 and Age of Conan come to mind immediately).

The simple fact is, the devs are usually hampered by two things: A. insufficient staff (or inexperienced staff) who don't have the time (or skillset) to wade through the data and B. preconceived notions of how things are supposed to work. The playerbase has the advantage of being able to throw thousands of people at a problem.

So yeah, sometimes the players have a much better idea how things are working than the devs....

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Players know what's actually happening better than the Devs. They know what they intended to do, we know what's actually happening. Did theg intended for Aux to Batt to become this monster? No, but we knew it would happen. Did they intend on having the ridiculous amounts of CrtH to stack up so we can have instavapes? No, but we're doing it. Did they intend for double tap to be a thing? No, but it happened. Did they intend for X to stack with Y? No, they probably didn't see people using the combination together - UT when you use X + Y, crazy shit goes down.

I didn't mean to say we know how to code their game better than them. I meant that we see the end result a little better and/or differently than they.

PvP lends itself to finding all those bizarre quirks to the engine and extreme edge cases in way that PvE just doesn't. Also tends to be a lot easier to consistently set up conditions, experiment, observe the results, and log the results. And in turn it's easier to collaborate those logs together to show a pattern of behavior.

It's come up plenty of times that the devs didn't fully understand what was going on and PvPers had to show literal months worth of combatlog data graphed out, video evidence, etc to show something was wrong.

How long did we go before the Devs were aware of how Tac buffs were boosting hull resists? That FBP was getting crazy buffed? That EPS was helping Beam DPS? Beam overcapping in general? The ever present Voldemort? That the Raptor's turn rate looked fine on paper, but was actually crippled due to its modeling?

You're right, my initial wording was wrong. The Devs have all of the raw data. But we know what's going on in regards as to how the content and it's bugs are being used.

This would be less of an issue, I think, if there were more ways for a cruiser to be able to put out serious DPS hurting. People like big ships and Star Trek hero ships, but they do not necessarily want to be support/healers. Not advocating that they become ultra-quick DPS-centric escort things, but I do think that if they want to take out A2B or nerf it somehow this is an issue that they need to address. They call them things like "Assault Cruiser" for a reason, after all.

Though honestly I have to wonder if they intended, when they started this thing, for there to be no power cycling. It would make sense, considering some of the builds I've seen in the FE's that force you to use a ship that isn't yours, but it would also make the game a lot more frustrating to play, especially if you get into major brawl situations. It's very difficult to monitor 20 powers, four shield facings, hull, your teammates, 6-8 weapons, cooldowns, four power levels, your present position and speed, and incoming fire from a dozen sources.